PBS special looks at authors who question the American dream

Great novels are subtle, complicated and sometimes have unhappy endings. The "voice" that tells the tale is often the most essential part of the story, and many a director of film and television has foundered trying to convey that narrative essence.

Tonight's PBS American Masters special, "Novel Reflections on the American Dream," succeeds in an area that seldom gets the TV treatment: the role of American novelists in exposing the warps and weaknesses in the fabric of the American dream. "Novel Reflections" aims to help the viewer hear the voice — through innovative production values, through expert commentary and through the personal stories of the authors, who all grappled with the American belief that self-reinvention is an enterprise with no limits.

Michael Epstein, the award-winning documentary filmmaker who produced "Novel Reflections," said in a PBS interview that his goal was to "take something that does not seem television friendly, which is reading and books, and make it watchable television. ... Our idea was that the American experience is often looked at through the biographies of great men and women, whether it's presidents or Rosa Parks. We look at it through our wars, our great epoch in time, but we very rarely look at it through our fiction."

This series might have been called "A Spy in the House of Success," for each writer, from Theodore Dreiser in the early 1900s to Gish Jen in the 1990s, is an outsider looking in, as he or she measures the cost of America's "secular religion," the belief in infinite self-improvement.

Epstein uses live actors to create still tableaus that advance through a stop-motion technique as a narrator reads passages from the novel. "What was paramount was that you hear Fitzgerald's voice, that you hear Steinbeck, that you hear Saul Bellow," Epstein said in a PBS interview. "You can't do that if you have actors playing a part."

The backgrounds are period-specific — "Sister Carrie" looks as if it is being viewed through a stereopticon; "The Great Gatsby" has the feel of hand-tinted postcards from the 1920s; and the stills for "The Grapes of Wrath" are composed as if the Great Depression photographer Dorothea Lange shot them. Gish Jen's novel "Typical American" presents its Chinese-American family mugging and laughing for a home movie.

Two "fallen" women,

one great reinventor

"Novel Reflections" begins with "Sister Carrie," Theodore Dreiser's 1900 masterpiece. It opens with Carrie Meeber gawking at Chicago from the window of a train, just like Dreiser did — Dreiser came from a brutally poor family in an Indiana town and moved to Chicago to "make it." Carrie makes it, but at great cost to those who love her.

Like Carrie Meeber, Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's "House of Mirth" tries to conquer high society through her looks and charm. Unlike Dreiser, Wharton came from a background of substantial wealth. But that wealth suffocated and trapped Wharton, who went through periods of severe depression until she broke out of her upper-class gentlewoman's mold by writing critically acclaimed books.

"House of Mirth" was unflinching in its portrayal of Lily's fall from favor with New York society — Lily was punished for her refusal to abide by the social contract, and "House of Mirth" was a huge hit. That was a far cry from the initial reaction to "Sister Carrie" — because Carrie loses her virtue but triumphs on Broadway as a successful actress, Dreiser's publisher refused to distribute copies of the book. "Sister Carrie" did not become a critical success until the 1920s.

Perhaps America's greatest story of reinvention is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." The novel was Fitzgerald's alternative history — he was turned down by the love of his life, Zelda Sayre, because he didn't have money, though he later made enough from the sale of his first book to woo her successfully. "The Great Gatsby" is partly a meditation on what might have happened if Fitzgerald hadn't grasped the gold ring of good fortune.

In "Novel Reflections," hand-tinted images of Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, are as dreamlike as the Gatsby narrative — until it becomes a nightmare. When Buchanan unmasks Gatsby as a pretender, it's "society's self-protective response to an invader," according to one commentator.

Like "Sister Carrie," "The Great Gatsby" was too devastating a commentary on its age to succeed in its time — its recognition as a classic came only after World War II, years after Fitzgerald died.

Taking care of their own

The most wrenching tale among these stories is "The Grapes of Wrath." Author Gloria Naylor, commenting on John Steinbeck's masterpiece, makes an astute commentary on the usefulness of the "American dream" as an instrument of social control: "The American Dream keeps society contained," she says — when it doesn't pan out, people blame their own shortcomings. Steinbeck's saga of Midwestern exiles who move to California for a better life, only to find broken promises, starvation and betrayal, is harrowing in part because the Joads are such sturdy believers in their ability to take care of their own.

"The Grapes of Wrath" came hard for Steinbeck, who first covered the terrible plight of migrants as a newspaper reporter. That experience became a "wound" for the author, according to one commentator. He wrote several versions of the story: one "full of vitriol," one documentary in quality and finally, the version that was published.

Unlike the public response to "Sister Carrie" and "The Great Gatsby," Americans were finally ready to confront the reality of the Depression — despite being condemned by an Oklahoma congressman as "a black infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind," "The Grapes of Wrath" sold 400,000 copies and was endorsed by Franklin Roosevelt.

Post-war tragedy, post-war reinvention

Life for African-Americans in post World War II is the subject of Ann Petry's grim classic, "The Street."

Petry, an African American from a middle-class background, took a job as a newspaper reporter in Harlem after World War II. From her notebooks and the pages of the newspaper, she constructed the story of an African-American woman who strives for a decent life for herself and her son.

Lutie Johnson works as a maid in a wealthy white household and is entranced by talk of "making it" in the stock market. Her husband leaves her to raise their son alone, and eventually she takes a job as a jazz singer; when she asks the band leader for money to get her son out of jail, he says he will bail her boy out — in exchange for sex. The confrontation between Lutie and "Boots" bears an eerie similarity to one in "House of Mirth," when Lily discovers that a "friend" expects sexual favors in exchange for investing her money for her. Like "House of Mirth," "The Street" became a best-seller.

"Novel Reflections" ends with Gish Jen's first novel, "Typical American," and Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day." Both are flavored with the American immigrant story; in both novels, the protagonists must come to terms with the fact that success American-style does not equal happiness.

Throughout "Novel Reflections," there are resonant references to the "can-do" message of one of America's first pieces of literature — Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.

As Lutie Johnson, the heroine of "The Street," walks home with a bag of groceries, she feels the bread loaves, and thinks of the scene from the autobiography when the young Franklin arrives in Philadelphia with nothing but a loaf of bread under each arm. It buoys her confidence; she believes she can overcome anything.

After Gatsby's death, Nick Carroway discovers a list of self-improvement tasks inscribed by the young Gatsby in his copy of "Hopalong Cassidy," just as Franklin recounted in his "Autobiography"; Gish Jen's Ralph Chang makes a similar list, though in Chinese. The message of "can-do" came early and often to Americans — "Novel Reflections" shows that realizing its limits is a further, universal American lesson.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com